The Willmar 8

The story of eight women in America's heartland -- Willmar, Minnesota -- who were driven by sex discrimination at work to find themselves unexpectedly at the forefront of the struggle for women's rights.

THE WILLMAR 8 is Academy Award-winner Lee Grant's documentary about working women which has been featured on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, excerpted on 60 Minutes, and was broadcast nationally by PBS. Risking jobs, friends, family and the opposition of church and community, the eight women began the longest bank strike in American history in a dramatic attempt to assert their own equality and self-worth.

"The true drama of America... A revealing portrait of an American small town and how the lives of eight women changed as they withstood community disapproval and gained a new sense of themselves." - Judy Stone, San Francisco Chronicle

"There could be no better film to show skeptics what the women's struggle is all about or to show women that the struggle is worth it." - Gloria Steinem

"Forthright...moving...inspiring...Explores contemporary folk heroism with an active admiring energy." - Janet Maslin, New York Times

Related videos

The story of the 1939 Missouri sharecroppers strike reveals the complex issues of cotton farming in the early 1930s and what it was like to be a sharecropper in that time.
One wintry morning in January 1939, residents of southeastern Missouri awoke to a startling sight. More than 1,000 sharecroppers…

The special contribution of South African women to the success of the anti-apartheid struggle is documented. Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Dora Tamana and other leaders recall their struggle against the hated pass system and their imprisonment and banning.
You Have Struck A Rock! commemorates the special contribution of South African…

From Tanzania and Zambia to Ivory Coast and Ghana belief in witchcraft continues to terrorize women: the denunciation, brutal beating, the banishment to an unknown village without family or friends. In Northern Ghana alone there are estimated to be more than 5000 'witches' confined to 'witches villages,' part sanctuaries, part…

Zora Neale Hurston, path-breaking novelist, pioneering anthropologist and one of the first black women to enter the American literary canon (Their Eyes Were Watching God), established the African American vernacular as one of the most vital, inventive voices in American literature. This definitive film biography, eighteen years in the making,…

Women in four African countries are shown organizing around issues of marital rights, reproductive health, female genital mutilation and entrepreneurship.
A film about African women is a rarity, even more, one made by an African woman. In FEMMES AUX YEUX OUVERTS, award-winning Togolese filmmaker, Anne-Laure Folly presents portraits of contemporary…

The first documentary to confront a painful and long taboo subject: the disturbing feelings many African Americans harbor about themselves and their appearance. African American filmmaker Kathe Sandler digs into the often subconscious world of "color consciousness," a caste system based on how closely skin color, hair texture and facial…

The lives, times, and music of Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Ethel Waters and other legendary women illustrate how the blues became a vital part of American culture.
WILD WOMEN DON'T HAVE THE BLUES shows how the blues were born out of the economic and social transformation of African…

The role of women in guerilla struggles and in post-liberation societies is depicted in a story of the women freedom fighters of the Zimbabwean liberation struggle. FLAME is perhaps the most controversial film ever made in Africa --certainly the only one to be seized by the police during editing on…

The number of infants who die before their first birthday is much higher in the U.S. than in other countries. And, for African Americans, the rate is nearly twice as high than it is for white Americans. Even well-educated Black women have birth outcomes worse than white women who haven't…

Eight professors of color discuss the special pressures that minority faculty face in majority white institutions. SHATTERING THE SILENCES: THE CASE FOR MINORITY FACULTY offers everyone in higher education an unprecedented opportunity to see American campuses through the eyes of minority faculty.
Across America, campus diversity is under attack; affirmative…

Everyday, the working class Coloured women in the garment industry of the windswept flats around Cape Town toil anonymously to make clothes so that other women will look beautiful. Invariably they cannot afford these garments themselves. But for one day a year they come out in all their glory at…

Memphis, Spring 1968 marked the dramatic climax of the Civil Rights movement. AT THE RIVER I STAND skillfully reconstructs the two eventful months that transformed a strike by Memphis sanitation worker into a national conflagration, and disentangles the complex historical forces that came together with the inevitability of tragedy at…